Force Officials

A woman's effort to retire 142 Air Force "astrochimps" from research into AIDS and other diseases has gotten a $1 million boost.Officials from the American Anti-Vivisection Society recently announced that they would donate the money to the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care, headed by biological anthropologist Carole Noon in Boynton Beach, Fla."It brings us up over the laugh level," Noon said. "It legitimizes us."Her organization, which includes anthropologist Jane Goodall, is trying to raise $14 million to buy land and build a sanctuary to observe and monitor the chimps.

WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. -- Let it be known: Water does not melt the B-2 bomber.The Air Force went to great lengths yesterday to make that point about the $2 billion planes after an August report from the General Accounting Office concluded that moisture ruined the bomber's invisibility to radar.Maintenance crews at the B-2s' home base soaked one of the exotic jets with hoses and scrubbed it as Air Force brass assured reporters that the plane is combat-ready."We're going to finish washing the plane today and it's going to come out and still be fully mission-capable," said Col. Bill Hood, logistics group commander at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City, Mo.The GAO, which is the investigatory arm of Congress, said in a report last month that the Northrop Grumman-built planes require extensive pampering and climate-controlled hangars to protect the surface materials that help them evade radar detection.

PHILADELPHIA -- When John Hoffman told his supervisor at the Air Reserve Station in suburban Willow Grove last year that he was gay, it did not occur to him that he could be discharged from the reserves and lose his full-time civilian job as a mechanic on the base.But that conversation, which Hoffman thought was private and between friends, caused him to lose both positions.Lawyers from the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union who are representing Hoffman say that while Air Force officials may have been able to discharge Hoffman, a Persian Gulf war veteran, from the reserves under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, they discriminated against him when they dismissed him from the civilian post.

Nearly 50 years have passed since Army Air Forces Sgt. John Moreno became a hero by relinquishing his parachute to another crewman as their B-24 bomber was going down over Budapest.Both men were in the nose. The other man's chute had come open when the plane was hit. He was too large to get through an escape hatch about 18 inches square with the canopy bundled in his arms.So Sergeant Moreno, who was smaller, gave up his own packed chute. Wearing it, the other crewman, a lieutenant, wriggled through the opening in the floor and fell clear of the four-engine plane, barely missing the two whirling propellers closest to the fuselage.

WASHINGTON -- With different branches of the arme services moving in different directions on the role of women, Defense Secretary Les Aspin says he will establish a common policy governing women in combat in the next several months.Mr. Aspin made his intentions known yesterday after Air Force officials gave details about a program that will stop training female student pilots on high-performance training aircraft.Women on active duty are not allowed to fly combat aircraft, but the high-performance training is an important step toward that goal.

WASHINGTON -- An Air Force inquiry has concluded that a two-star general made disparaging remarks about President Clinton and he now faces disciplinary action that will effectively end his career, senior Air Force officials said yesterday.The Air Force inquiry found that Maj. Gen. Harold N. Campbell called Mr. Clinton a "dope-smoking," "skirt-chasing," "draft-dodging" commander-in-chief, in a speech last month in the Netherlands.Senior military officers are frequently asked at congressional hearings to give their personal opinions on military policies, but it is extremely rare for an officer to ridicule his commander openly, especially the president.

WASHINGTON -- The Air Force will have to lay off as many as 3,300 junior officers this year and next as it struggles to pare its ranks and reduce its budget, according to the service's top general.The firings would be the first by any of the armed services during the current drawdown and would mark the first time since the end of the Vietnam War that the Air Force has cut its budget by issuing pink slips to career military officers.Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, told the Los Angeles Times that the service has drawn up the extraordinary plans because young officers have shunned a special buyout offer in far greater numbers than expected.

WASHINGTON -- The Air Force will have to lay off as many as 3,300 junior officers this year and next as it struggles to pare its ranks and reduce its budget, according to the service's top general.The firings would be the first by any of the armed services during the current drawdown, and would mark the first time since the end of the Vietnam War that the Air Force has cut its budget by issuing pink slips to career military officers.Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, told the Los Angeles Times that the service has drawn up the extraordinary plans because young officers have shunned a special buyout offer in far greater numbers than expected.

WASHINGTON -- The well-oiled coordination the Pentagon showed during Operation Desert Storm appears to be missing from its latest effort to develop a pilotless spy plane.In this case, the Navy and Air Force teamed up to produce what government auditors reveal is a multimillion-dollar misfit.The Navy designed the drone, and the Air Force designed the payload -- a sophisticated video recorder -- only to discover afterward that the payload is too big for the plane or, conversely, that the plane is too small for the payload.

WASHINGTON -- A contracting team led by Lockheed Corp. won a historic high-stakes contest yesterday to supply the Air Force with a $70 billion arsenal of sophisticated fighter jets, known as the Advanced Tactical Fighter, well into the next century.The team -- which includes Boeing Co. and General Dynamics Corp. -- beat out a rival partnership of Northrop Corp. and McDonnell Douglas Corp. for what Air Force officials called the largest aerospace contract ever. Both teams spent five years and a total of $1.4 billion developing and testing prototype aircraft in competition to secure the lucrative military business.

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that U.S. military services are not doing enough to support soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, singling out the Air Force for adapting too slowly to the new enemies on those battlefields. In unusually harsh public criticism, Gates said his attempts to get the Pentagon to help commanders more quickly on the ground have been "like pulling teeth," and he blamed military leaders who are "stuck in old ways of doing business." He said he was particularly upset with the military's failure to get more unmanned spy planes into the air over the two war zones - primarily an Air Force responsibility.

WASHINGTON -- Boeing Co. said yesterday that it would formally protest a $35 billion contract awarded by the Air Force to a team that would use a European plane to replace the aging fleet of U.S. aerial refueling tankers. "Our team has taken a very serious look at the tanker decision and found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal," W. James McNerney Jr., Boeing's chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "This is an extraordinary step rarely taken by our company and one we take very seriously."

. The Air Force has conducted more than 2,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan over the past six months, a sharp increase in bombing that reflects the growing demand for U.S. air cover since NATO has assumed a larger ground combat role, Air Force officials said. The intensifying air campaign has focused on southern Afghanistan, where NATO units, primarily from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, as well as U.S. Special Forces have been engaging in the heaviest and most frequent ground combat with Taliban rebels since the invasion five years ago. The NATO forces are mostly operating without heavy armor or artillery support, and as Taliban resistance has continued, more air support has been used to compensate for the lightness of the units, Air Force officials said.

DAVIS-MONTHAN AIR FORCE BASE, Ariz. -- It is only 7 a.m., but John Nimrichter has been pulling parts from outdated military airplanes for an hour. "These things get sizzling hot," he says, looking up at a 1950s-era B-52 bomber sitting on the baked desert just south of Tucson. "You'll lose your breath." Driving up and down endless rows of mothballed fighters, bombers, helicopters and cargo planes, Nimrichter and a crew of 63 fellow Air Force mechanics mine them for replacement parts for aircraft still in use. Many go into planes on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing a less expensive way to repair them than buying new parts.

WASHINGTON -- Straining to find troops to maintain force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has begun deploying thousands of Air Force personnel to combat zones in new jobs as interrogators, prison sentries and gunners on supply trucks. The Air Force years ago banked its future on fighter jets and billion-dollar satellites. Yet the service that has long avoided being pulled into ground operations is now finding that its people - rather than its weapons - are what the Pentagon needs most as it wages a prolonged war against a low-tech insurgency.

WASHINGTON - Seeking to curb a climate at the U.S. Air Force Academy that some cadets have said is intolerant of non-Christians, the Air Force offered new guidelines yesterday that discourage public prayer, disappointing critics who had sought an outright ban. "Public prayer should not usually be included in official settings such as staff meetings, office meetings, classes or officially sanctioned activities," the new interim policy says. But it notes that prayer can be beneficial under "extraordinary circumstances" such as "mass casualties, preparation for imminent combat or natural disasters."

WASHINGTON - As several lawmakers accused military officials of a failure of leadership, the Senate took action yesterday to force the Pentagon to accept an outside review of the sexual assault scandal at the Air Force Academy. By voice vote, the Senate approved a measure requiring Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to name by May 1 an independent panel to review the Air Force's response to dozens of allegations of rape, sexual assault and other sexual misconduct at the academy within the past decade.

WASHINGTON -- An Air Force major at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware was charged yesterday with disobeying an order for refusing to take the Pentagon's mandatory anthrax vaccine, the first active-duty officer cited in a growing, nationwide revolt that has centered on National Guard and Reserve forces. Maj. Sonnie G. Bates, 35, a C-5 cargo plane pilot with 13 years of service and glowing reviews, could be sentenced to five years in prison for declining the six-shot regimen, saying he fears it is unsafe and untested.

A woman's effort to retire 142 Air Force "astrochimps" from research into AIDS and other diseases has gotten a $1 million boost.Officials from the American Anti-Vivisection Society recently announced that they would donate the money to the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care, headed by biological anthropologist Carole Noon in Boynton Beach, Fla."It brings us up over the laugh level," Noon said. "It legitimizes us."Her organization, which includes anthropologist Jane Goodall, is trying to raise $14 million to buy land and build a sanctuary to observe and monitor the chimps.

WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. -- Let it be known: Water does not melt the B-2 bomber.The Air Force went to great lengths yesterday to make that point about the $2 billion planes after an August report from the General Accounting Office concluded that moisture ruined the bomber's invisibility to radar.Maintenance crews at the B-2s' home base soaked one of the exotic jets with hoses and scrubbed it as Air Force brass assured reporters that the plane is combat-ready."We're going to finish washing the plane today and it's going to come out and still be fully mission-capable," said Col. Bill Hood, logistics group commander at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City, Mo.The GAO, which is the investigatory arm of Congress, said in a report last month that the Northrop Grumman-built planes require extensive pampering and climate-controlled hangars to protect the surface materials that help them evade radar detection.